Redmond goes after Apple with five touch-enabled wild mice of the future

Not content with being viewed as the second-best in the multi-touch race, Microsoft’s hardware lab tamed five cool mice implementing various touch methods. Although we’re awaiting Apple’s multi-touch Mighty Mouse with great anticipation, Redmond mice rock!

The Microsoft-sponsored event served as a launchpad for mice of the future that incorporate various implementations of the multi-touch technology, allowing interesting new ways of interacting with a computer, including gestures like pinch window resize, moving through photos by flicking your thumb over the side of a mouse, etc.

Take the aptly-named Arty. This odd-looking gizmo has three optical mouse sensors to track the individual movements of the wrist, thumb, and index finger by leveraging the mechanically articulated thumb and index finger extensions mounted on a palm rest unit. Cap Mouse is the most “ordinary” device in Microsoft’s arsenal, sporting capacitive multi-touch sensing, like the iPhone. Then there is Frustrated Total Internal Reflection (FTIR) that captures finger movement using an internal camera and then uses computer vision to recognize gestures.

Microsoft Research: Arty mouse

Microsoft Research: Cap mouse

Microsoft Research: FTIR mouse

Microsoft Research: Orb mouse

Microsoft Research: Side mouse

Similarly, Orb Mouse leverages internal IR camera to recognize finger gestures. Finally, buttonless Side Mouse rounds up the crazy five with a proximity-sensing technology dubbed SideSight that lets it track multi-finger gestures in the region around the device. Check out the two videos.

Christian’s Opinion

If you ask me, Apple’s rumored mightier mouse might run scared when Microsoft unleashes its five wild mice into the market. While Microsoft’s devices won’t win any beauty contest, they look robust enough and, what’s most important, seem like they could be cheap to manufacture. This will be paramount as no-one is going to buy a $100 mouse, not in this economy – even if it does multi-touch and your dishes.

Note that an ordinary mouse has become overnight the next battleground for Microsoft and Apple, two arch rivals engaged in a fierce battle over who’s gonna bring a cooler multi-touch-enabled device to the market. Apple began with the iPhone and Microsoft followed with Surface, Zune HD, and a plethora of third-party smartphones powered by Windows Mobile 6.5. Apple preps a touch-enabled tablet, prompting Microsoft to show off its concept Courier tablet ahead of release. And now we have touch-enabled mice from Apple and Microsoft – nice.

This will benefit consumers because cheap touch-enabled mouse peripherals will introduce touch computing to the mass market. Despite whatever you may think, the vast majority of consumers still don’t own touch devices like pricey smartphones, tablets, etc. I’ve even read somewhere a guy proposing the multi-touch mouse + multi-touch smartphone combo, so your phone would also double as a touch-enabled mouse that needn’t be moved at all. How crazy is that?